over the park when London's in a mist.
It's the open place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham.
They're pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if
they happen to be burning wood in the keeper's lodge which is there.
I could tell you now how to get from place to place, and exactly what
trees you'd pass, and where you'd cross the roads. You see, I played
there when I was small. Spring is good, but it's best in the autumn
when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back through the
streets, and you can't see people properly; they come past very quick,
you just see their faces and then they're gone--that's what I like--and
no one knows in the least what you're doing--"

"But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?" Hewet checked her.

"Tea? Oh yes. Five o'clock. Then I say what I've done, and my aunts
say what they've done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let's
suppose. She's an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had
eight children; so we ask after them. They're all over the world; so we
ask where they are, and sometimes they're ill, or they're stationed in
a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five
months. Mrs. Hunt," she said with a smile, "had a son who was hugged to
death by a bear."

Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by
the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it
necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.

"You can't conceive how it interests me," he said. Indeed, his cigarette
had gone out, and he had to light another.

"Why does it interest you?" she asked.

"Partly because you're a woman," he replied. When he said this, Rachel,
who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a
childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation,
as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch into an
argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against each
other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as words
were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different
direction.

"I've often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and
one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the
women were doing inside," he said. "Just consider: it's the beginning of
the twentieth century, a